For the second year running a pro-bono cooperation between the United Nations World Food Programme and public relations agencies in Eurocom Worldwide helped promote the global event ‘Walk the World’. Media coverage of the event generated huge interest and hundreds of thousands of participants around the world.

Eurocom Worldwide, the global PR Network, has successfully completed another year of pro-bono support of the global fight against child hunger. For the last two years running member agencies of Eurocom Worldwide have worked free of charge to promote and support the ‘Walk the World’ event, which is organised annually by the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) on a worldwide scale.

In 2006, the cooperation between WFP and Eurocom Worldwide encompassed ten Eurocom member Agencies in Europe, Russia, Asia and the Middle East, who undertook communications and Public Relations activities on behalf of WFP.

The highlight of this Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaign is ‘Fight Hunger: Walk the World’. On Sunday 21 May more than 760,000 people in 118 countries and 420 locations, across 24 time zones, participated in ‘Walk the World’. All around the globe, people came out in force to deliver a message: child hunger has no place in this world and citizens working together can root it out.

Eurocom Worldwide member agencies in Brazil, China, Denmark, England, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Norway, Russia and the United Arab Emirates took part in this year’s programme, and donated time and efforts to help promote and create awareness of the walks and the issues of global child hunger. The campaign included traditional PR tools such as press releases and interviews, while it also encompassed organising of television and radio features and pro-bono insertion of WFP-advertisements in national key media.

Each of the agencies cooperated directly with the national WFP offices, while Eurocom Worldwide’s member agency in Germany, SCHWARTZ PR, was responsible for global coordination with WFP’s headquarters in Rome, Italy.

Together with WFP, Eurocom Worldwide succeeded in creating awareness of ‘Walk the World’ and its global message: The world should not look away when 350 million children are starving to the extent that every 5 seconds a child dies of starvation.

World Food Programme’s Senior Public Information Officer, Ramin Rafirasme was deeply moved by the engagement of the Eurocom Worldwide member agencies. He said:

“I have worked over 15 years in humanitarian aid managing media campaigns. I speak from experience when I say that in my entire career I have never seen such strong outcome of a media campaign which was not about war or famine. We experienced incredible media support and we are extraordinarily grateful for the efforts by Eurocom Worldwide.”

“I am pleased to announce that we have already reached agreement that the cooperation between WFP and Eurocom Worldwide will continue in 2007,” said Ramin Rafirasme.

Mads Christensen, Eurocom Worldwide Network Director, said: “Eurocom Worldwide is among the largest independent PR networks, and we have an obligation to serve humanitarian organisations as much as commercial ones. We are proud of the success we have achieved working for WFP, which is primarily derived from the brilliant and professional work done by our member agencies.”

“The member agencies of Eurocom Worldwide are strongly positioned in their local markets and have excelled at creating superb regional campaign work for WFP, while operating flawlessly as a global team,” said Mads Christensen.

Notes For Editors:

About World Food Programme
WFP is the world's largest humanitarian agency: each year, it feeds an average of 90 million poor people to meet their nutritional needs, including 61 million hungry children, in at least 80 of the world's poorest countries. For just 19 US cents a day, you can help WFP give children in poor countries a healthy meal at school – a gift of hope for a brighter future. For more information, visit www.wfp.org.

About Eurocom Worldwide
Eurocom Worldwide is a collaboration between independent, privately owned communications agencies offering unrivalled expertise in international communications campaigns executed by local people. Eurocom Worldwide have 29 member agencies comprising over 1,200 communications specialists and consultants in 60 national capitals and centres of commerce around the globe. For more information, visit www.eurocompr.com.

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